Doctor On The Ball

by Richard Gordon

  I wondered if this slow puncture of the ego was affecting his psychological suspension. ‘Any other reason for your feeling tense, anxious, nervous?’

  He announced, ‘Well, actually, I got this bodyscanner.’

  I suggested, ‘Perhaps we have our terminology in a twist? A bodyscanner is a machine, not a complaint.’

  ‘I mean this bodyscanner what I got in my front room.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘What an extraordinary article to have about the house! Surely they don’t put them in those mail-order catalogues, like the sandwich toasters?’

  He glanced round furtively. ‘Look, doctor. This is all between four walls, innit?’

  I raised my right hand and informed him smugly, ‘“Whatever I see or hear, professionally or privately, which ought not to be divulged, I will keep secret and tell no one.” Hippocratic Oath. Looked it up again only yesterday.’ (Crossword clue.)

  Syd Farthingale asked warily, ‘I mean, the Old Bill ain’t arriving to copy my medical file into their notebooks?’

  ‘Even if the Lord Chancellor blew in, he wouldn’t get a butcher’s.’

  Folding his arms again, he remarked, ‘You know what hospitals are these days, doctor. Everything disposable.’

  I nodded. ‘Cheaper than washing up.’

  ‘So there’s a lot of stuff lying around. Stands to reason. Paper operating hats, used needles, old scalpels, plastic razors, rubber gloves, wipes. Doing them a favour, arni?’

  I was puzzled. ‘How?’

  ‘Carting it all away, o’course,’ he explained patiently. ‘Why, I’m probably saving the Health Service thousands a year in refuse collection. Do I get thanks for it? No, I do not! And the way the government’s carrying on about pinching every penny, I ask you. These crates were lying about in the stores a couple of years, no one seemed to want them, so I disposed of them.’

  ‘Crates? What crates?’

  ‘The ones in the stores,’ he spelt out. ‘We used my mate Len’s van what delivers the patients’ flowers. Get them home, find they contain a bodyscanner. Diabolical.’

  ‘I see. You’re worried at stealing an essential piece of hospital equipment.’

  ‘Not thieving, doctor, if you don’t mind,’ he replied indignantly, ‘just saving space. It’s shocking the General couldn’t put to merciful use this scanner, saving human lives and that. No, they say, we have no money to pay staff to work it, similar with six wards and a new block of operating theatres. The government don’t give a monkey’s if people die in the streets.’

  ‘The financing of the National Health Service presents many difficulties, certainly,’ I agreed.

  ‘But I meantersay, what can I do with a bleeding bodyscanner?’ Syd Farthingale dropped political arguments. ‘I cannot flog it in a pub, like a load of syringes – all disposed-of ones, of course, doctor. I cannot sell it for scrap, like them obsolescent operating tables what they got hanging about the stores last year. I cannot get rid of it through the trade, like five thousand gallons of paint what was ordered the wrong colour. Nobody’s got the welfare of the General nearer their heart than me, doctor, I don’t mind clearing away their unwanted goods, but who’d work for nothing? Can you help a bloke?’ he ended, as miserably as Napoleon performing a U-turn at Moscow.

  ‘Mr Farthingale, I cannot approve of your business methods, but I should like to see the scanner back at the General on the off chance that one day somebody might possibly use it,’ I told him primly. ‘Surely the simplest remedy for a complex piece of scientific apparatus in your parlour, doubtless dreadfully awkward when you have friends round for a jar, is to replace it in the flower van, back up to the door of the storeroom, and put it back?’

  ‘There’s a snag, doctor. You see, Len’s doing a bit of porridge. It was a misunderstanding. Someone was using his credit card.’

  ‘Nothing criminal in that,’ I objected, mystified.

  ‘And vice versa,’ he explained. ‘You see, we nicked this bodyscanner at Christmas. No one at the General’s noticed yet. Mind, I reckon they’ll take as long to start wanting it back as them Greeks with the Elgin marbles what we borrowed. But you never know, some people are always inquisitive,’ he mused. ‘Though mind you, if the fuzz sledge-hammered down my front door looking for things, I’d have the lads out at the General in a pig’s whisper. Bring the healing process to a grinding halt, police harassment, innit? The same with spares going missing from British Leyland, you name it, meantersay, the law has no place in industrial relations, right?’

  ‘I have a brilliant idea.’

  He sat up and stared like Napoleon at Marshal Ney clearing his throat at the council table.

  When entangled in the genito-gastric complex of the hedonistic Haymasons, I had recalled a tale about feeding substituting for fornicating, written by the Frenchman André Maurois (who ended up writing the biography of Alexander Fleming). Searching then for the story in the bookshelf, I had discovered it in his Silence of Colonel Bramble, a sentimental, sad, sycophantically satirical image of the British in World War One – and so in all wars from the Hundred Years’ to our next one, a nation’s character changing only as slowly as the modulations of Darwinism.

  Colonel Bramble embodied a story about another colonel, who commands an ammunition depot. One morning, he discovers only forty-nine machine guns, not fifty. To spare himself unending trouble with the War Office, perhaps his pay stopped, possibly a court martial, the wily officer indents for the replacement of a broken machine-gun tripod, which is sent without question. The next month for a replacement gun sight, then ammunition feed, recoil plate, trigger assembly, until by his retirement from the Army he had reconstructed an entire machine gun.

  I felt the principle could be applied in reverse to the weapons of life.

  ‘Why not leave the bodyscanner round the hospital in bits?’ I suggested. ‘No one will look twice at you, taking a computer or whatever from the boot of your car, carrying it through the front door and dropping it in the canteen or outpatients’. The law can’t put a finger on you, once you’ve restored the status quo ante, even in fragments.’

  He was awestruck. ‘I wish I had your brains, doctor.’

  I held up a hand again. ‘“Calm deliberation unravels every knot.” Harold Macmillan. He hung it up in Downing Street.’

  The bodyscanner vanished from my mind as entirely as from the storeroom. I was confident that a man of Syd Farthingale’s subtlety, who could halt the General’s operating by blacking the laundering of the surgeons’ white trousers, would effortlessly free himself from his electronic incubus.

  The following week, we were invited to dinner by the Windrushes. He is a pathologist at the General, a tall, sinewy man whom I tolerate as a golfing companion despite his painful medical-student sense of humour. Over the inescapable roast frozen duck, I inquired idly, ‘Is there much thieving at the hospital?’

  He guffawed. ‘You must be joking. Don’t you know, the National Health Service is Britain’s Sin City? Makes Chicago look like Lourdes.’

  I had an irrational but irrepressible uneasiness.

  ‘They nick anything from X-ray films for the silver and oxygen cylinders for the steel, to the patients’ flowers and toffees. Mad, coming into hospital with any money, wristwatch, soap, even clothes. Government sheets, pillowcases, towels, nighties, you could open a branch of Marks and Spencer’s. Detergent, floor polish, it’s all on the invoices, but it’s fairy gold for someone. The canteens lose millions in swiped chicken legs, cheese rolls and suchlike; with the money the government could open half the wards it closed for economy. Did you hear about our bodyscanner?’

  I dropped my knife and fork.

  ‘Didn’t Jilly tell you? Enormous row at the General. It was whipped. Out of the stores. Not even unpacked.’

  ‘Utterly, appallingly cruel.’ His wife shuddered.

  ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to.’ So did mine.

  ‘Worse still,’ Windrush continued with relish, ‘it was
donated by the Friends of Man, the do-gooder lot, the fruit of people giving themselves coronaries on marathons, diverting good beer money into pub collecting boxes, free-falling from aeroplanes and playing the piano for twenty-four hours, you know the thing. Naturally, they’re making a terrific fuss. Man’s Best Friend was down, enormous bloke in a prickly green suit, beard like a fretful porpentine, pulverizing Applebee the administrator.’ Windrush stared at me. ‘You all right, Richard? You’ve turned white.’

  ‘Just a touch of the old dyspepsia.’

  He grinned. ‘I thought you might have the bodyscanner in your front room, or something.’

  ‘I do hope you’ll be able to enjoy the Pavlova,’ said Mrs Windrush considerately.

  That night I confided to Sandra about Syd Farthingale.

  ‘I’d have reported him to the police,’ she said firmly.

  ‘How could I? Professional secrecy. Hippocratic Oath.’

  ‘Pooh! A man like Farthingale would have stolen Aesculapius’ staff and serpents and sold them as kebabs.’

  ‘They’ll find the scanner round the hospital,’ I suggested hopefully, ‘decide there was a mix-up with the equipment, and see if anyone’s been trying to make a diagnosis with a canteen toaster. I expect the fuss will die down.’

  The fuss had as little chance of dying down as the one about Burke and Hare.

  12

  ‘The General’s in trouble again,’ Mrs Jenkins greeted me when I arrived at the surgery two mornings later. ‘Worse than that time the old operating-theatre ceiling caved in.’

  She passed me Britain’s most popular paper, with SCANNER SCANDAL! on the front page. Outraged, it recounted a miracle machine presented to the government by saintly citizens, only to be lost by the National Health Service as casually as a commuter’s umbrella. The paper expressed little wonder at doctors continually cutting off the wrong arms and legs and leaving the cutlery inside.

  I painfully feigned amused detachment. The case of the misplaced scanner was hardly my responsibility, but I had the feeling of not wishing to encounter Syd Farthingale again any more than Her Majesty might welcome intruders in her bedroom.

  He appeared at evening surgery.

  ‘What about putting it back?’ I started sternly.

  ‘But doctor, I have put it back,’ he replied nervously. ‘Every bleeding bit of it, it’s all round the hospital, everywhere from the consultants’ toilet to the mortuary. Been there all week, but nobody seems to notice,’ he complained indignantly. ‘It’s amazing! People are blind. I suppose there’s always bits and pieces hanging about hospitals, you know, sort of wheelchairs, laundry bins, cardiac-arrest trolleys, everyone thinks it’s someone else’s job to shift them. It’s on my conscience, doctor, something terrible.’

  ‘So it should be,’ I told him harshly.

  ‘I mean, all this in the papers, kids giving up their pocket money and that.’

  ‘I’m glad you feel the extent of your heartlessness.’

  ‘Also, Mr Applebee the administrator – no pal of mine, I’m telling you – is beginning to ask questions like, Have I got anything that dropped off the back of an ambulance? Pure victimization. And furthermore,’ he admitted miserably, ‘the lads ain’t all that solid on police harassment; in fact, if they saw the police harassing me they’d probably all fall about. I dunno, the old spirit’s gone since those days when you’d get Mr Applebee on bended knee asking me please to turn the water on again. I just don’t know what to do next.’

  ‘Let me make it crystal clear, Mr Farthingale, that I utterly refuse to become involved with this sordid affair further.’

  ‘But you got to help me, doctor,’ he insisted.

  I gave the look of Dr Arnold at Rugby selecting the right birch for the stroke. ‘Go to Mr Applebee first thing tomorrow and make a clean breast of it.’

  ‘I’d like to, doctor. But what about you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Well, it’s you what suggested it,’ he said slyly. ‘We’re in this together, ain’t we?’

  I was aghast. ‘You…you own up at once,’ I proposed weakly.

  ‘Then there’s these other things.’

  ‘What other things?’

  ‘Well, sort of pyjamas, sets of operating instruments, towels, dressings, soap, crates of sugar and tea, few washing machines, typewriters, beds, gowns, gloves, sets of canteen trays, speculums, sigmoidoscopes, packs of razors, anaesthetic machines, cornflakes; the wife’s for ever complaining there’s hardly room to swing a cat, and that’s come from the General, too.’

  ‘You must take it all back,’ I told him, flustered. ‘At once. Rent a van. An articulated lorry, if necessary.’

  ‘Supposing there was a spot of bother with the Old Bill?’ He eyed me like Napoleon observing the Imperial Guard charge an unexpected breech in the enemy’s lines. ‘They’d feel real puzzled you never grassed, wouldn’t they? So’s they could call on me early one morning and make a nice clean job of it. They got shockingly suspicious minds, the police. That’s perverting the course of justice, innit? Funny thing,’ he reminisced, ‘a pal of mine got done for just that last Whitsun. Matter of getting a witness to suffer what you doctors call loss of memory. Got six years. Mind, the judge was a silly old moo, got the idea in his head that witnesses tell the truth actual. Come to think of it,’ he speculated knowledgeably, ‘the law might have you and me for conspiracy, then there’s no limit to the sentence, not so’s you notice it.’

  Mr Farthingale,’ I said. ‘If you are ill, I shall be delighted to see you any time of the day or night. If you are not, I never want to see you again. Ever. Good evening.’

  I drove to the General as soon as surgery was over. Jilly was finishing an operating list. She emerged from the theatre in pale blue operating dress, paper hat and white clogs, clipboard of patient’s notes under her arm.

  ‘Why, Daddy,’ she greeted me cheerfully. ‘Seeing a patient?’

  ‘Do you know a man called Farthingale?’

  Jilly nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, one of the theatre porters, and cheeky with it. I’ve a vague feeling he may not be completely honest.’

  ‘Something terrible has happened.’ I grasped her bare forearm. ‘I see myself struck off the register, disgraced, dishonoured, disowned, arrested, tried. I hear the clang of prison doors. I shall have to resign from the golf club.’

  ‘Golly,’ said Jilly.

  ‘I must talk.’

  ‘Well, I must see a patient in recovery. Look, go down to the mess. I’ll come and buy you a drink,’ she suggested charitably.

  And what would Dr Quaggy say? I wondered. That I was Churchford’s answer to Dr Crippen?

  I put the case to her in the residents’ bar.

  ‘But why don’t you run and tell a policeman?’ she asked, mystified. ‘There’s always plenty of them hanging about accident and emergency.’

  I explained desperately. ‘That would be simply clapping my own handcuffs, as the ghastly little ponce’s accomplice.’

  ‘But the police would always accept your word for what happened.’

  ‘They didn’t when I drove into that milk float.’

  ‘I know! Turn Queen’s evidence. Then you can lay it on as thick as you like.’

  ‘There’s more than legal quibbles,’ I explained in martyred tones. ‘He can sneak on me, but I can’t on him. Unethical, you see. Professional secrecy. I learned about the scanner only as the cause of his psychological disturbance. It would be exactly the same if he’d asked me to treat a gunshot wound, or bellyache from gulping a handful of diamonds before going through Customs. Hippocrates really does choose the most awkward times to come whispering in your ear.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Daddy. All you’d get from the GMC would be a round of applause. Why, hello, Dr Windrush.’

  I grabbed him by the lapels. He was too alarmed even for his usual humourless remark about rich GPs buying penniless pathologists a drink. I repeated my evidence. He gave a low whistle. ‘Well, breaking stones every
day in broad arrows is a jolly sight healthier exercise than jogging in a sexy tracksuit–’

  ‘You’ve got to help me.’

  ‘Don’t worry, they’ll probably give you a cushy job in the library, with the stockbrokers and defrocked clergymen–’

  ‘You have got to help my father,’ said Jilly fiercely.

  He looked startled. ‘Sorry. I only came to collect a specimen from a houseman, but I’ll have a gin and ton. Perhaps we should send Applebee an anonymous letter saying where the bits of scanner are, like a treasure hunt? He’s a dreadful creep, of course, no more than a frustrated VAT inspector, but this affair has dropped him so deep in the droppings, he’d be too grateful to fuss how the thing came to be scattered under his nose. He can organize search parties, issue a statement to the press that the scanner was merely mislaid, something that’s always happening in government departments. I mean, the Foreign Office is for ever leaving top-secret papers in bistros, the Army litters Dorset with unexploded shells, and the Exchequer loses millions of quid every time it tries to add up.’

  ‘Without mentioning that king-sized kleptomaniac Farthingale?’ I asked.

  ‘No need. I’ll say it came to me in a dream.’

  A ray of sunlight fell between the iron-studded gates. ‘I wouldn’t mind seeing Farthingale get his just deserts,’ I reflected warmly. ‘Preferably stuffed up somewhere uncomfortable.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ said Windrush, sipping thoughtfully.

  That night I could barely sleep. I kept listening for the Old Bill sledge-hammering down my front door. After morning surgery, I missed lunch and drove to the General.

  I bleeped Jilly. She was with Mr Applebee, and would I come up? I took the lift to the administration floor. Approaching down the corridor was Windrush.

  ‘Richard! I’ve fixed that one-man Mafia, Farthingale,’ he greeted me cheerfully. ‘Grabbed him in the porters’ rest room – where he earns his pay playing pontoon – said he’d been shopped, demanded to know where the loot was stashed, and said I’d see he collected ten years unless he resigned as shop steward of ACHE. I got really tough, made Judge Jeffreys look like a social worker. Don’t you see? This’ll instantly reopen the children’s ward, closed because of his row with the shop steward of OUCH about who’ll screw in the light bulbs, or something. I’m just bearing the good news to Applebee. He’ll be over the moon, won’t think of asking nasty questions. By the way, your Jilly’s been scavenging. Oh, Applebee’s having a wonderful morning.’